A native application development kit has been released for Android developers, offering a way to create certain kinds of high-performing applications for handsets running the Google platform. Android applications run through the Dalvik virtual machine, which emulates a Java virtual machine. On Thursday, the Android Native Development Kit (NDK) was released, allowing coders to create parts of their Android 1.5 applications outside Dalvik, using native-code languages such as C and C++.
This is a good first step, but I actually like the VM idea, so I’d rather see an SDK allowing other languages like Python to nativity target Dalvik and the associated Google libraries.
There already is a scripting env or you could use Scala.
the original release, or blog post news,… instead of another news site?
something like
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/06/introducing-android-…
or
http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/1.5_r1/index.html
Now you can finally leverage the Linux in your Linux phone.
Way overdue, but glad it is here. The Linux developer community who didn’t care to learn some non-standard Java mutant can finally be unleashed!
It looks like the NDK doesn’t let you write whole applications in C or C++. It lets you call native libraries and include them in your application. Basically, JNI for Android’s Java dialect. Hopefully, the interface is compatible with JNI.
Most applications won’t make use of this but it is important for applications that want to do more computation efficiently. Also, it will allow using open source libraries which would be hard to port to Java. For example, writing an entire X server in Java would be hard but doing Xnest with an Android GUI around it would be much easier.
I don’t disagree with this but thought you may find these interesting: http://www.jcraft.com/weirdx/ and http://www.jcraft.com/wiredx/
I imagine they wouldn’t be straightforward to run on Android so it doesn’t negate your point (also they are probably not as full-featured as the “real” code would be) but I thought folks might be interested anyhow.